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74 Cards in this Set

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memory

how things are remembered and why things are forgotten

stages of memory

sensory, short term, and long term

sensory memory

lasts seconds. forms connection between perception and memory. e.g. when pen wiggled back and forth, the sensory information remains in your awareness briefly and because the pen moved quickly, the information all runs together, creating the illusion of a ghost pen in all positions

iconic memory

sensory memory for vision

George Sperling

studied "iconic memory". Found that people could see more than they can remember.

partial report

in Sperling's experiments, subjects were able to write down the strings of letter of a particular line that had just been presented to them, but in the time it took them to do this, they had forgotten the other strings of letters

Ulric Neisser

coined term "icon" and found that an icon lasts for about one second. Also discovered "backward masking"

icon

brief visual memory

backward masking

when subjects are exposed to a bright flash of light or a new pattern before the iconic image fades, the first image will be erased

echoic memory

sensory memory for auditory sensations

short-term memory (STM)

temporary; lasts for seconds or minutes

George Miller

found that STM has the capacity of about 7 items (+ or - two)

chunking

grouping items; can increase the capacity of STM

phonological

STM is thought to be largely auditory and items are coded phonologically

rehearsal

repeating or practicing. key to keeping items in the STM and to transferring items to the LTM.

primary (maintenance) rehearsal

involves repeating material in order to hold it in STM

secondary (elaborative) rehearsal

involves organizing and understanding material in order to transfer it to LTM

interference

How other information or distractions cause one to forget items in STM. STM and LTM are susceptible to interference.

proactive interference

interference in which the disrupting information was learned before the new items were presented, such as a list of similar words. Problematic for recall and thus causes proactive inhibition

retroactive interference

interference in which the disrupting information was learned after the new items were presented. Problematic for recall and thus causes retroactive inhibition

long-term memory (LTM)

capable of permanent retention. Most items are learned semantically, for meaning.

measure of LTM retention that requires subjects to generate information on their own. "Cued recall" begins the task.

cued recall

e.g. fill-in-the-blank

free recall

remembering with no cue

savings

measures how much information about a subject remains in LTM by assessing how long it takes to learn something the second time as opposed to the first time

encoding specificity principle

material is more likely to remembered if it is retrieved in the same context in which it was stored. LTM is subject to this effect.

episodic memory

consists of details, events, and discrete knowledge

semantic memory

constists of general knowledge of the world

procedural memory

knowing "how to" do something

declarative memory

knowing a fact

Herman Ebbinghaus

first to study memory systematically. Presented subjects with lists of nonsense syllables to study the STM. Proposed "forgetting curve"

forgetting curve

depicts a sharp drop in savings immediately after learning and then levels off, with a slight downward trend

Frederick Bartlett

found that memory is "reconstructive" rather than rote using the story "War of the Ghosts"

reconstructive

people are more likely to remember the ideas or semantics of a story rather than the details or grammar of a story

Allan Paivio

suggested the "Dual Code hypothesis"

Dual Code hypothesis

items will be better remembered if they are encoded both visually (with icons or imagery) and semantically (with understanding).

Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart

asserted that learning and recall depend on "depth of processing"

depth of processing

different levels of processing exist from the most superficial phonological (pronunciation) level to the deep semantic (meaning) level. The deeper an item is processed, the easier it is to learn and recall.

behaviorists and learning

explain memory through "paired-associate learning"

paired-associated learning

one item is learned with, and then cues the recall of, another

Elizabeth Loftus

found that memory of traumatic events is altered by the event itself and by the way that questions about the event are phrased. Important for law-psychology issues, such as witness questioning.

Karl Lashley

found that memories are stored diffusely in the brain

Donald Hebb

posited that memory involves changes of synapses and neural pathways, making a "memory tree". Brain studies of young chicks also show that their brains are altered by learning and memory

E.R. Kandel

based on his studies with the sea slug Aplysia, believed that memory involves changes in synapses and neural pathways

Brenda Milner

wrote about "HM" who was given a lesion of the hippocampus to treat severe epilepsy and could not add anything to his LTM

hippocampus

possibly related to LTM

serial learning

verbal learning and memory task in which a list is learned and recalled in order ("serial recall")

serial recall

list is recalled in order

primacy and recency effects

How the first and last few items of a list are easiest to remember. First items are remembered because they benefit from the most rehearsal/exposure; last items because there has been less time for decay. Serial learning is subject to these effects. LTM is NOT subject to these effects.

serial-position curve

depicts the primacy and recency savings effects as a U-shaped curve

serial-anticipation learning

a list is learned

paired-associate learning

use this type of learning to study foreign languages. e.g. remember the Spanish word before remembering the English meaning

free-recall learning

list of items is learned, and then must be recalled in any order with no cue

acoustic dissimilarity

factor that makes items on a list easier to learn and retrieve

semantic dissimilarity

factor that makes items on a list easier to learn and retrieve

brevity

(in length of the terms and in length of the list of items to be remembered). factor that makes items on a list easier to learn and retrieve

familiarity

factor that makes items on a list easier to learn and retrieve

concreteness

factor that makes items on a list easier to learn and retrieve

meaning

factor that makes items on a list easier to learn and retrieve

importance to the subject

factor that makes items on a list easier to learn and retrieve

decay theory

aka Trace theory. Theory of the origin of forgetting which posits that memories fade with time. Too simplistic because other activities are known to interfere with retrieval

interference theory

Theory of the origin of forgetting which suggests that competing information blocks retrieval.

like state-dependent learning. Retrieval is more successful if it occurs in the same emotional or physical state in which encoding occurred. e.g. depressed individuals cannot easily recall happy memories and alcoholics often remember the details of their last drinking session only when under the influence of alcohol

clustering

brain's tendency to group together similar items in memory whether they are learned together or not. Most often, they are grouped into conceptual or semantic hierarchies

order of items on a list

recall task in which subjects can more quickly state the order of 2 items that are far apart on the list than 2 items that are close together. e.g. 7 and 593 easier than 133 and 136

incidental learning

measured through presenting subjects with items they are not supposed to try to memorize and then testing for learning

eidetic memory

photographic memory. More common in children and rural cultures

flashbulb memory

recollectiong that seem burned into the brain

tachtiscope

instrument often used in cognitive or memory experiments. It presents visual material (words or images) to subjects for a fraction of a second